OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Energy-Efficient UAV Multicasting with Simultaneous FSO Backhaul and Power Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This letter studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided multicasting (MC) system, which is enabled by simultaneous free space optics (FSO) backhaul and power transfer. The UAV applies the power-splitting technique to harvest wireless power and decode backhaul information simultaneously over the FSO link, while at the same time using the harvested power to multicast the backhauled information over the radio frequency (RF) links to multiple ground users (GUs). We derive the UAV's achievable MC rate under the Poisson point process (PPP) based GU distribution. By jointly designing the FSO and RF links and the UAV altitude, we maximize the system-level energy efficiency (EE), which can be equivalently expressed as the ratio of the UAV's MC rate over the optics base station (OBS) transmit power, subject to the UAV's sustainable operation and reliable backhauling constraints. Due to the non-convexity of this problem, we propose suboptimal solutions with low complexity. Numerical results show the close-to-optimal EE performance by properly balancing the power-rate tradeoff between the FSO power and the MC data transmissions.
Analysis Towards Classification of Infection and Ischaemia of Diabetic Foot Ulcers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper introduces the Diabetic Foot Ulcers dataset (DFUC2021) for analysis of pathology, focusing on infection and ischaemia. We describe the data preparation of DFUC2021 for ground truth annotation, data curation and data analysis. The final release of DFUC2021 consists of 15,683 DFU patches, with 5,955 training, 5,734 for testing and 3,994 unlabeled DFU patches. The ground truth labels are four classes, i.e. control, infection, ischaemia and both conditions. We curate the dataset using image hashing techniques and analyse the separability using UMAP projection. We benchmark the performance of five key backbones of deep learning, i.e. VGG16, ResNet101, InceptionV3, DenseNet121 and EfficientNet on DFUC2021. We report the optimised results of these key backbones with different strategies. Based on our observations, we conclude that EfficientNetB0 with data augmentation and transfer learning provided the best results for multi-class (4-class) classification with macro-average Precision, Recall and F1-score of 0.57, 0.62 and 0.55, respectively. In ischaemia and infection recognition, when trained on one-versus-all, EfficientNetB0 achieved comparable results with the state of the art. Finally, we interpret the results with statistical analysis and Grad-CAM visualisation.
DRL-Assisted Resource Allocation for NOMA-MEC Offloading with Hybrid SIC
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been regarded as promising technologies to improve computation capability and offloading efficiency of the mobile devices in the sixth generation (6G) mobile system. This paper mainly focuses on the hybrid NOMA-MEC system, where multiple users are first grouped into pairs, and users in each pair offload their tasks simultaneously by NOMA, and then a dedicated time duration is scheduled to the more delay-tolerable user for uploading the remaining data by orthogonal multiple access (OMA). For the conventional NOMA uplink transmission, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is applied to decode the superposed signals successively according to the channel state information (CSI) or the quality of service (QoS) requirement. In this work, we integrate the hybrid SIC scheme which dynamically adapts the SIC decoding order among all NOMA groups. To solve the user grouping problem, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based algorithm is proposed to obtain a close-to-optimal user grouping policy. Moreover, we optimally minimize the offloading energy consumption by obtaining the closed-form solution to the resource allocation problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm converges fast, and the NOMA-MEC scheme outperforms the existing orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme.
Semi-Supervised Classification of Social Media Posts: Identifying Sex-Industry Posts to Enable Better Support for Those Experiencing Sex-Trafficking
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Social media is both helpful and harmful to the work against sex trafficking. On one hand, social workers carefully use social media to support people experiencing sex trafficking. On the other hand, traffickers use social media to groom and recruit people into trafficking situations. There is the opportunity to use social media data to better provide support for people experiencing trafficking. While AI and Machine Learning (ML) have been used in work against sex trafficking, they predominantly focus on detecting Child Sexual Abuse Material. Work using social media data has not been done with the intention to provide community level support to people of all ages experiencing trafficking. Within this context, this thesis explores the use of semi-supervised classification to identify social media posts that are a part of the sex industry. Several methods were explored for ML. However, the primary method used was semi-supervised learning, which has the benefit of providing automated classification with a limited set of labelled data. Social media posts were embedded into low-dimensional vectors using FastText and Doc2Vec models. The data were then clustered using k-means clustering, and cross-validation was used to determine label propagation accuracy. The results of the semi-supervised algorithm were encouraging. The FastText CBOW model provided 98.6% accuracy to over 12,000 posts in clusters where label propagation was applied. The results of this thesis suggest that further semi-supervised learning, in conjunction with manual labeling, may allow for the entire dataset containing over 50,000 posts to be accurately labeled. A fully labeled dataset could be used to develop a tool to identify an overview of where and when social media is used within the sex industry. This could be used to help determine better ways to provide support to people experiencing trafficking.
Evaluating Medical IoT (MIoT) Device Security using NISTIR-8228 Expectations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

How do healthcare organizations (from small Practices to large HDOs) evaluate adherence to the cybersecurity and privacy protection of Medical Internet of Things (MIoT) used in clinical settings? This paper suggests an approach for such evaluation using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidance. Through application of NISTIR 8228 Expectations it is possible to quantitatively assess cybersecurity and privacy protection, and determine relative compliance with recommended standards. This approach allows organizations to evaluate the level of risk a MiOT device poses to IT systems and to determine whether or not to permit its use in healthcare/IT environments. This paper reviews the current state of IoT/MiOT cybersecurity and privacy protection using historical and current industry guidance & best-practices; recommendations by federal agencies; NIST publications; and federal law. It then presents similarities and differences between IOT/MiOT devices and "traditional" (or classic) Information Technology (IT) hardware, and cites several challenges IoT/MiOT pose to cybersecurity and privacy protection. Finally, a practical approach to evaluating cybersecurity and privacy protection is offered along with enhancements for validating assessment results. In so doing it will demonstrate general compliance with both NIST guidance and HIPAA/HITECH requirements.
Enabling Integration and Interaction for Decentralized Artificial Intelligence in Airline Disruption Management
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Airline disruption management traditionally seeks to address three problem dimensions: aircraft scheduling, crew scheduling, and passenger scheduling, in that order. However, current efforts have, at most, only addressed the first two problem dimensions concurrently and do not account for the propagative effects that uncertain scheduling outcomes in one dimension can have on another dimension. In addition, existing approaches for airline disruption management include human specialists who decide on necessary corrective actions for airline schedule disruptions on the day of operation. However, human specialists are limited in their ability to process copious amounts of information imperative for making robust decisions that simultaneously address all problem dimensions during disruption management. Therefore, there is a need to augment the decision-making capabilities of a human specialist with quantitative and qualitative tools that can rationalize complex interactions amongst all dimensions in airline disruption management, and provide objective insights to the specialists in the airline operations control center. To that effect, we provide a discussion and demonstration of an agnostic and systematic paradigm for enabling expeditious simultaneously-integrated recovery of all problem dimensions during airline disruption management, through an intelligent multi-agent system that employs principles from artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technology. Results indicate that our paradigm for simultaneously-integrated recovery executes in polynomial time and is effective when all the flights in the airline route network are disrupted.
Correlation Sketches for Approximate Join-Correlation Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

The increasing availability of structured datasets, from Web tables and open-data portals to enterprise data, opens up opportunities~to enrich analytics and improve machine learning models through relational data augmentation. In this paper, we introduce a new class of data augmentation queries: join-correlation queries. Given a column $Q$ and a join column $K_Q$ from a query table $\mathcal{T}_Q$, retrieve tables $\mathcal{T}_X$ in a dataset collection such that $\mathcal{T}_X$ is joinable with $\mathcal{T}_Q$ on $K_Q$ and there is a column $C \in \mathcal{T}_X$ such that $Q$ is correlated with $C$. A naïve approach to evaluate these queries, which first finds joinable tables and then explicitly joins and computes correlations between $Q$ and all columns of the discovered tables, is prohibitively expensive. To efficiently support correlated column discovery, we 1) propose a sketching method that enables the construction of an index for a large number of tables and that provides accurate estimates for join-correlation queries, and 2) explore different scoring strategies that effectively rank the query results based on how well the columns are correlated with the query. We carry out a detailed experimental evaluation, using both synthetic and real data, which shows that our sketches attain high accuracy and the scoring strategies lead to high-quality rankings.
Prism: Private Verifiable Set Computation over Multi-Owner Outsourced Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes Prism, a secret sharing based approach to compute private set operations (i.e., intersection and union), as well as aggregates over outsourced databases belonging to multiple owners. Prism enables data owners to pre-load the data onto non-colluding servers and exploits the additive and multiplicative properties of secret-shares to compute the above-listed operations in (at most) two rounds of communication between the servers (storing the secret-shares) and the querier, resulting in a very efficient implementation. Also, Prism does not require communication among the servers and supports result verification techniques for each operation to detect malicious adversaries. Experimental results show that Prism scales both in terms of the number of data owners and database sizes, to which prior approaches do not scale.
Exploring Task Placement for Edge-to-Cloud Applications using Emulation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

A vast and growing number of IoT applications connect physical devices, such as scientific instruments, technical equipment, machines, and cameras, across heterogenous infrastructure from the edge to the cloud to provide responsive, intelligent services while complying with privacy and security requirements. However, the integration of heterogeneous IoT, edge, and cloud technologies and the design of end-to-end applications that seamlessly work across multiple layers and types of infrastructures is challenging. A significant issue is resource management and the need to ensure that the right type and scale of resources is allocated on every layer to fulfill the application's processing needs. As edge and cloud layers are increasingly tightly integrated, imbalanced resource allocations and sub-optimally placed tasks can quickly deteriorate the overall system performance. This paper proposes an emulation approach for the investigation of task placements across the edge-to-cloud continuum. We demonstrate that emulation can address the complexity and many degrees-of-freedom of the problem, allowing us to investigate essential deployment patterns and trade-offs. We evaluate our approach using a machine learning-based workload, demonstrating the validity by comparing emulation and real-world experiments. Further, we show that the right task placement strategy has a significant impact on performance -- in our experiments, between 5% and 65% depending on the scenario.
Bootstrapping of memetic from genetic evolution via inter-agent selection pressures
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We create an artificial system of agents (attention-based neural networks) which selectively exchange messages with each-other in order to study the emergence of memetic evolution and how memetic evolutionary pressures interact with genetic evolution of the network weights. We observe that the ability of agents to exert selection pressures on each-other is essential for memetic evolution to bootstrap itself into a state which has both high-fidelity replication of memes, as well as continuing production of new memes over time. However, in this system there is very little interaction between this memetic 'ecology' and underlying tasks driving individual fitness - the emergent meme layer appears to be neither helpful nor harmful to agents' ability to learn to solve tasks. Sourcecode for these experiments is available at https://github.com/GoodAI/memes
Towards On-Device Face Recognition in Body-worn Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face recognition technology related to recognizing identities is widely adopted in intelligence gathering, law enforcement, surveillance, and consumer applications. Recently, this technology has been ported to smartphones and body-worn cameras (BWC). Face recognition technology in body-worn cameras is used for surveillance, situational awareness, and keeping the officer safe. Only a handful of academic studies exist in face recognition using the body-worn camera. A recent study has assembled BWCFace facial image dataset acquired using a body-worn camera and evaluated the ResNet-50 model for face identification. However, for real-time inference in resource constraint body-worn cameras and privacy concerns involving facial images, on-device face recognition is required. To this end, this study evaluates lightweight MobileNet-V2, EfficientNet-B0, LightCNN-9 and LightCNN-29 models for face identification using body-worn camera. Experiments are performed on a publicly available BWCface dataset. The real-time inference is evaluated on three mobile devices. The comparative analysis is done with heavy-weight VGG-16 and ResNet-50 models along with six hand-crafted features to evaluate the trade-off between the performance and model size. Experimental results suggest the difference in maximum rank-1 accuracy of lightweight LightCNN-29 over best-performing ResNet-50 is \textbf{1.85\%} and the reduction in model parameters is \textbf{23.49M}. Most of the deep models obtained similar performances at rank-5 and rank-10. The inference time of LightCNNs is 2.1x faster than other models on mobile devices. The least performance difference of \textbf{14\%} is noted between LightCNN-29 and Local Phase Quantization (LPQ) descriptor at rank-1. In most of the experimental settings, lightweight LightCNN models offered the best trade-off between accuracy and the model size in comparison to most of the models.
On-FPGA Training with Ultra Memory Reduction: A Low-Precision Tensor Method
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Various hardware accelerators have been developed for energy-efficient and real-time inference of neural networks on edge devices. However, most training is done on high-performance GPUs or servers, and the huge memory and computing costs prevent training neural networks on edge devices. This paper proposes a novel tensor-based training framework, which offers orders-of-magnitude memory reduction in the training process. We propose a novel rank-adaptive tensorized neural network model, and design a hardware-friendly low-precision algorithm to train this model. We present an FPGA accelerator to demonstrate the benefits of this training method on edge devices. Our preliminary FPGA implementation achieves $59\times$ speedup and $123\times$ energy reduction compared to embedded CPU, and $292\times$ memory reduction over a standard full-size training.
1st Place Solution to ICDAR 2021 RRC-ICTEXT End-to-end Text Spotting and Aesthetic Assessment on Integrated Circuit
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents our proposed methods to ICDAR 2021 Robust Reading Challenge - Integrated Circuit Text Spotting and Aesthetic Assessment (ICDAR RRC-ICTEXT 2021). For the text spotting task, we detect the characters on integrated circuit and classify them based on yolov5 detection model. We balance the lowercase and non-lowercase by using SynthText, generated data and data sampler. We adopt semi-supervised algorithm and distillation to furtherly improve the model's accuracy. For the aesthetic assessment task, we add a classification branch of 3 classes to differentiate the aesthetic classes of each character. Finally, we make model deployment to accelerate inference speed and reduce memory consumption based on NVIDIA Tensorrt. Our methods achieve 59.1 mAP on task 3.1 with 31 FPS and 306M memory (rank 1), 78.7\% F2 score on task 3.2 with 30 FPS and 306M memory (rank 1).
On Mixed Iterated Revisions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Several forms of iterable belief change exist, differing in the kind of change and its strength: some operators introduce formulae, others remove them; some add formulae unconditionally, others only as additions to the previous beliefs; some only relative to the current situation, others in all possible cases. A sequence of changes may involve several of them: for example, the first step is a revision, the second a contraction and the third a refinement of the previous beliefs. The ten operators considered in this article are shown to be all reducible to three: lexicographic revision, refinement and severe withdrawal. In turn, these three can be expressed in terms of lexicographic revision at the cost of restructuring the sequence. This restructuring needs not to be done explicitly: an algorithm that works on the original sequence is shown. The complexity of mixed sequences of belief change operators is also analyzed. Most of them require only a polynomial number of calls to a satisfiability checker, some are even easier.
BSTC: A Large-Scale Chinese-English Speech Translation Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents BSTC (Baidu Speech Translation Corpus), a large-scale Chinese-English speech translation dataset. This dataset is constructed based on a collection of licensed videos of talks or lectures, including about 68 hours of Mandarin data, their manual transcripts and translations into English, as well as automated transcripts by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. We have further asked three experienced interpreters to simultaneously interpret the testing talks in a mock conference setting. This corpus is expected to promote the research of automatic simultaneous translation as well as the development of practical systems. We have organized simultaneous translation tasks and used this corpus to evaluate automatic simultaneous translation systems.
Escape the Fake: Introducing Simulated Container-Escapes for Honeypots
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

In the field of network security, the concept of honeypots is well established in research as well as in production. Honeypots are used to imitate a legitimate target on the network and to raise an alert on any interaction. This does not only help learning about a breach, but also allows researchers to study the techniques of an attacker. With the rise of cloud computing, container-based virtualization gained popularity for application deployment. This paper investigates the possibilities of container-based honeypots and introduces the concept of simulating container escapes as a deception technique.
Explainability-based Backdoor Attacks Against Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Backdoor attacks represent a serious threat to neural network models. A backdoored model will misclassify the trigger-embedded inputs into an attacker-chosen target label while performing normally on other benign inputs. There are already numerous works on backdoor attacks on neural networks, but only a few works consider graph neural networks (GNNs). As such, there is no intensive research on explaining the impact of trigger injecting position on the performance of backdoor attacks on GNNs. To bridge this gap, we conduct an experimental investigation on the performance of backdoor attacks on GNNs. We apply two powerful GNN explainability approaches to select the optimal trigger injecting position to achieve two attacker objectives -- high attack success rate and low clean accuracy drop. Our empirical results on benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art neural network models demonstrate the proposed method's effectiveness in selecting trigger injecting position for backdoor attacks on GNNs. For instance, on the node classification task, the backdoor attack with trigger injecting position selected by GraphLIME reaches over $84 \%$ attack success rate with less than $2.5 \%$ accuracy drop
A Proposal for an Interactive Shell Based on a Typed Lambda Calculus
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents Favalon, a functional programming language built on the premise of a lambda calculus for use as an interactive shell replacement. Favalon seamlessly integrates with typed versions of existing libraries and commands using type inference, flexible runtime type metadata, and the same techniques employed by shells to link commands together. Much of Favalon's syntax is customizable via user-defined functions, allowing it to be extended by anyone who is familiar with a command-line shell. Furthermore, Favalon's type inference engine can be separated from its runtime library and easily repurposed for other applications.